Lauren Schoenherr packed four bags and left for Chemnitz, Germany, to play professional volleyball for nine months.

It was 2005. A few months earlier, Schoenherr – formerly Lauren Goins – had graduated from Cal State Fullerton as the only Titan to amass 1,000 kills and 1,000 digs.

Arriving in Germany, street signs looked like symbols. Songs on the radio sounded like muffled noise. Volleyball was the only language she knew.

The outside hitter was excited to play overseas, even if Germans laughed at the flip flops she wore throughout the rough, cobblestoned city.

“Like every kid I had always kind of idolized people like Mia Hamm or Michael Jordan,” Schoenherr said. “I was like, ‘Wow they get to play sports for a living?’ That’s something I wanted to do, but didn’t even fathom that was an option for me.”

Many young women don’t view professional sports as a viable option because few opportunities exist in the United States, despite the boom in amateur participation rates.

“At the youth, high school and the collegiate level, women’s sports are just exploding,” said Jaime Schultz, an assistant professor at Penn State University specializing in gender and sport. “It just strikes me as so sad that we can’t sort of transition that participatory experience into being consumers of women’s sport.”

There is no indoor professional volleyball league. Though basketball, soccer and softball have pro leagues, there are few spots: 12 basketball teams, nine soccer teams and four softball teams.

And because league salaries are meager, U.S. pro players play overseas in the offseason to generate income.

Many former Cal State Fullerton female athletes like Schoenherr have thrived abroad.

The most famous Titan abroad is Karen Bardsley, who is currently a goalkeeper for Manchester City Women in England. She competed at CSUF from 2002 to 2006.

Softball All-Americans Yasmin Mossadeghi (1999-02) and Gina Oaks (2000-03) have played in five countries combined. And at the moment, Ann Marie Tangorra (2011-12) is playing soccer in Switzerland and Leah Best (2011-13) is playing volleyball in Sweden.

These women know that pro ball doesn’t last forever and it doesn’t always pay the bills, but with a plane ticket, passport and good knees, why not chase that dream around the word?

Expectations overseas

It’s easy to spot them down the street in other countries.

“Mostly everyone looks at us different because we are American,” said Tangorra, 23.

It could be height, language, complexion, hair, or manners. Skill level also stands out.

Americans are expected to increase a team’s competitiveness, and in some cases, are even asked to help coach. That attention comes with criticism.

Schoenherr’s German team lost its home-opener in a five-set loss. The city’s newspaper ripped her to shreds the next day, largely about her physical appearance.

“If you’re doing really, really well, you’re the hero,” said Schoenherr, 30, who also played in the Netherlands. “But if the team’s doing poorly, it’s your fault.”

Mossadeghi’s team won the softball championship in Freising, Germany, to the dismay of German opponents.

“I had gotten hit I think six times in that tournament,” said Mossadeghi, 34, who also played in Russia. “They weren’t going to let me hit home runs off of them.”

Americans also have to adjust to different styles of play.

In addition to playing in Italy and Australia, Gina Oaks played in Japan. Most American teams practice three or so hours per day; Oaks’ team in Japan practiced for eight.

“They train like no other country I’ve ever seen,” said Oaks, 33, a pitcher and utility player. “I loved it. I was always a player that liked to practice so it was really cool to be out there, but after about five hours you’re kind of like, ‘Okay is it time to be done now?’ But that’s their culture and we embraced it,” Oaks said.

Living thousands of miles away from family and friends can be difficult.

Schoenherr didn’t have internet for the first four months and struggled with the nine-hour time difference back home.

But she relished the disconnect because it allowed her to meet new people, including her husband.

Players can spend months and even years abroad, building memories and learning new languages and customs. It’s sort of like a romantic escape, traveling the world, playing the sport you love, uninterrupted by life’s demands.

But what happens when your body can’t do some of the things it used to at 20?

“Time there is very fleeting,” said Schoenherr, who played four of the seven years she lived abroad. “While you’re in it you think it’s forever and then all of a sudden you’re not playing anymore.”

It’s a painful realization, but women find other ways to stay close to the sport once they return to the States.

Schoenherr is a coordinator for the USA Volleyball Foundation located in the American Sports Center in Anaheim, where the men’s and women’s national teams train.

Mossadeghi is the head softball coach at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, Calif, and Oaks is an assistant coach at Loyola Marymount University.

But what about the young women they coach, who aspire to play professionally in the U.S.? Why are there still so few pro opportunities for them?

“If I had the answer to that, I’d be a millionaire,” said Nicole LaVoi, senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota and the associate director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport.

“I don’t know if there is an answer to that. It has to do a lot I think with the media and with sports we always see on TV (that) tells people what’s culturally relevant and important,” she said, referring to football, men’s basketball, baseball and hockey. “So that’s where the money goes.”

LaVoi said research indicates female athletes make up 40-43 percent of all athletic participants, yet receive less than 4 percent of all media coverage.

That disparity isn’t for lack of interest, according to Cheryl Cooky, an associate professor at Purdue University who specializes in gender and sport.

“There’s this perception that the media are just kind of passively giving viewers what they want to see,” Cooky said. “When you talk to sports journalists, that’s the excuse that they give. ‘Well we would cover women’s basketball or we would cover women’s softball if that was what audiences wanted to see.’”

“The media play a key role in building and fostering audiences for men’s sports,” Cooky added. “If the media were to cover women’s sports and do it in a way that parallels the way they cover men’s sports, that’s definitely a huge step in the right direction for building solid women’s professional leagues.”

Until media bias improves and until corporate sponsors fully embrace women’s sports, elite female players will keep playing abroad for the love of the game, scraping together an income out of as many seasons they can. But when their careers end, they hope to return to the States with much more than a paycheck.

“We’re definitely not playing for the money,” Oaks said. “We’re playing to grow the sport.”

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